A bomb falling from a plane, a boy trapped in a car, a newsman with a passion to tell their stories

Scanning news headlines from across the state this week I came across this one in the Enterprise Ledger: "An abiding passion for telling people's stories."

Kyle Mooty, editor of the Enterprise Ledger and a man with a passion to tell the stories of people

The column below that headline belongs to Kyle Mooty, editor of the Ledger.

Mooty, 52, has been in the news business since he was 18. A native Alabamian, he has worked in a number of states from Georgia to Arkansas to Missouri to Texas.

In all those places Mooty has told the story of people. And he's learned a thing or two about them along the way.

"People are pretty much the same anywhere you go," said Mooty. "Sure, there are some regional differences. Some places people are a little more conservative or a little less so. But there is more that unites us than I think we always see and I think telling stories about us, about who we are, is a function the press has done a long time, and people value it even if they sometimes don't like the press that much.

Mooty's work this past Sunday summarizes some of the stories he has heard.

One was from a 96-year-old man who on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, was standing on a dry dock at Pearl Harbor with fellow Navy band members preparing to play morning colors when he looked up to see something fall from an airplane. Moments later that "something" exploded and as the plane flew by the band, the man saw on it the bright red circles symbolizing a rising sun. Of course, the plane was Japanese.

Then there is the story of a 4-year-old boy trapped in the back of a car that had driven off a road in the Ozarks in Arkansas and was missing for days. Any car driving by would never see it, but reflected sunlight caught a driver's eye and that led to a call to police who found the boy's dead mother in the front seat.

The boy was in the back and relatively fine. What that child told the firemen who had to cut into the car to save him will cause you to stop and think a minute. It did me.